
Class JiB-LL3, 



PRESENTED BY 



I.RICH B. FHILLIPe' 



The Economic and Political 

Essays of the Ante- 

Bellum South 



BY 

ULRICH B. PHILLIPS 



Reprinted from 
THE SOUTH IN THE BUILDING OF THE NATION 
(Volume VII) 



THE SOUTHERN PUBLICATION SOCIETY 

RICHMOND, VA., 1909 



K^ 




ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 173 



CHAPTER Vin 

ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS IN THE 
ANTE-BELLUM SOUTH. 



^N the ante-bellum period and for a genera- 
tion afterward the Northern people and 
those of many European countries were 
profoundly concerned with liberalizing 
their social and economic institutions and with 
strengthening their national governments. But in 
the South the oppressive burden of the great race 
problem forced the body politic into social con- 
servatism, and at the same time the necessity of in- 
suring exemption from Northern control through 
Congressional majorities obliged the Southern lead- 
ers usually to antagonize nationalistic movements. 
The great world outside was radical in temper and 
nationalistic in policy; the South was conservative 
and stressed the rights of local units under the gen- 
eral government. The world measured the South by 
its current standards and found the South wanting. 
The world was not concerned with what the South 
had to say in its own behalf; it refused to read 
Southern publications and judged the South un- 
heard. While alien and unfriendly views of the Old 
South abound to-day in huge editions, the conserva- 
tive writings of Southerners to the manner born are 
mostly fugitive and forgotten. Yet on the whole, 
the Southern product of economic and political es- 
says was very large, and in the mass these writings 
constitute a varied and often excellent body of liter- 
ature, highly valuable as interpreting and recording 
the life and opinions of the successive generations. 



174 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, 

As a rule these writings deal not with strictly eco- 
nomic or strictly political themes, but with complex 
public questions involving economics, politics and 
society simultaneously. They can be fitted into a 
plan of treatment only with difficulty and with some 
danger of slighting significant minor phases in 
some of the important essays discussed. 

Theoretical and General Economics. 

Economic theory is, of course, a development of 
quite recent growth. There was not much discussion 
of it in America in the ante-bellum period, and few 
Southerners, in particular, were closet philosophers 
enough to deal with its refinements. Some of the 
strongly edited newspapers, such as the Federal 
Union of Miiledgeville, Ga., assigned columns regu- 
larly to ** Political Economy," discussing theoretical 
questions in them at times, but filling them more 
generally with concrete items relating to industry 
and commerce at home and abroad. Among the col- 
lege professors who wrote on economic themes, 
Thomas Cooper, long the dominant personality in 
South Carolina College, schooled a whole genera- 
tion of budding statesmen in thorough-going laissez- 
faire economic doctrine; Thomas Dew, at William 
and Mary, and George Tucker, at the University of 
Virginia, appear to have taught political economy, 
without special bias, along with various other sub- 
jects in social and psychological fields, while J. D. 
B. DeBow, professor of political economy in the 
University of Louisiana at New Orleans, probably 
treated in his lectures more of concrete subjects of 
American industry and commerce than of unsub- 
stantial theories. Each of these men might well 
have written general economic treatises, but Tucker 
and Cooper alone did so. 

After a preliminary series of vigorons essays on 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 175 

banking, public debts, population, etc., written in 
1813 and collected into a volume in 1822, Tucker 
published a scholarly general treatise on money and 
banking in 1839, and a statistical analysis of the 
United States census returns in 1843. Cooper's 
only formal economic writing was his Lectures on 
the Elements of Political Economy, 1826, which em- 
bodied the current economic thought of the laissez- 
faire school. He, of course, advocated free trade 
and free banking. Incidentally, he estimated slave 
labor, imder the existing conditions in the cotton 
belt, to be more expensive than free labor. Dew 
apparently published nothing noteworthy except his 
famous essay on slavery, 1833, while DeBow con- 
tented himself with editing his Review and a cyclo- 
pedic description of Southern and Western re- 
sources in 1853-54, superintending the eighth United 
States census, writing a compendium of that census, 
1854, and issuing occasional articles on the planta- 
tion system and the project of reopening the foreign 
slave trade. Aside from the writings of these few 
professional economic philosophers, the South pro- 
duced practically nothing in economic theory or in 
formal statistics. Robert Mills' Statistics of South 
Carolina, 1826, and George Wliite's Statistics of 
Georgia, 1849, were mere historical and descriptive 
miscellanies. 

Agriculture. 

Few Southerners were pen-and-ink men by native 
disposition. Most of them wrote for publication 
only under the pressure of public emergency. In 
easy times the reading class of Southerners would 
read the ancient and modern European classics, and 
the local newspapers would be concerned mainly 
with world politics. But in times of industrial crises 
thinking men would inquire for economic and social 
treatises throwing light upon American problems; 



176 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

the newspapers would teem with essays on the 
causes, character and remedies of the existing de- 
pression, and the job-presses would issue occasional 
books and numerous pamphlets by local authors 
upon the issues of the day. 

In Southern agriculture each occurrence of a 
crisis brought forth substantial writings, whether 
soil surveys, descriptions of methods, or didactic es- 
says. Near the end of the Eighteenth century, for 
example, occurred a severe depression in Carolina 
coast industry, and in 1802 appeared Drayton's 
View of South Carolina, describing methods and 
improvements in indigo, rice and cotton, and in 
1808 Eamsay's History of South Carolina was pub- 
lished, with a large appendix full of agricultural 
data from and for the sea-island district. During 
the War of 1812 tobacco was heavily depressed, and 
John Taylor, of Caroline, began to write his Arator 
essays for newspaper and pamphlet publication. Ei 
the late twenties the Eastern cotton belt felt the 
pinch of Western competition, and in 1828 was es- 
tablished at Charleston the Southern Agriculturist, 
a strongly edited monthly which was well supported 
by subscribers and contributors for several years 
until the return of easy times. From 1839 to 1844 
was the most severe economic depression in the his- 
tory of the ante-bellum South. Cotton was prin- 
cipally affected, but all other interests suffered in 
sympathy. The result was an abundant activity in 
economic writing, agriculture included. Edmund 
Euffin, who had long been conspicuous as a soil and 
crop expert in Virginia, was employed by the com- 
monwealth of South Carolina to make an agricul- 
tural survey of the state, made his first descriptive 
report in 1843, and published occasional essays and 
addresses during the next decade upon soils and 
fertilizers. R. F. W. AUston, a sea-island planter, 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 177 

published in 1843 a memoir on rice planting (as well 
as a general descriptive essay in 1854 on Southern 
seacoast crops), and in 1844 Whitemarsh B. Sea- 
brook, president of the South Carolina Agricultural 
Society, afterward governor of the state, published 
a memoir upou the development of sea-island cotton 
culture. 

All of these publications were soon eclipsed in 
unportance by the establishment of the famous and 
iEvaluable DeBow's Review at New Orleans in 1846, 
wliich for many years afterward not only abounded 
in contributed articles and news items upon agricul- 
tural and other economic subjects, but also reprinted 
most of the noteworthy fugitive addresses and es- 
says which appeared in the field of Southern eco- 
nomics during the period of the Review's publica- 
tion. The Cotton Planters' Manual, compiled by 
J. A. Turner, of Georgia (1857), deserves mention 
as a collection of useful essays reprinted from vari- 
ous sources on cotton culture, plant diseases, ma- 
nures and commerce. On the sugar industry, noth- 
ing was written in the United States of value com- 
parable to several essays in the West Indies: 
Clement Caines, Letters on the Cultivation of the 
Otaheite Cane (London, 1801), the anonymous 
Practical Rules for the Management and Medical 
Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies 
(London, 1803), and M. G. Lewis' Journal of a West 
India Proprietor (London, 1834). 

Mining, Manufactures, Transportation and Commerce. 
Upon the subject of mining, all Southern colonial 
and ante-bellum literature is negligible after the 
time of William Byrd's excellent description of the 
Virginia iron mines about 1732. West Virginia salt, 
Tennessee copper and Georgia gold were neglected 
by all but newspaper writers, while Carolina phos- 

Vol. 7—13. 



178 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

phates, Alabama iron, Louisiana sulphur and Texas 
oil did not begin to be mined until after the ante- 
bellum period. 

On manufactures, William Gregg published a se- 
ries of articles in the Charleston Courier and col- 
lected them in a pamphlet, 1845. He described the 
prior attempts at textile manufacturing in South 
Carolina, attributing their ill-success to the small- 
ness of the scale of operation and the failure of 
each mill to specialize in a single sort of cloth ; and 
he urged more extensive embarkation upon manu- 
facturing and the avoidance of past errors. Aside 
from factory officials in their company reports and 
occasional descriptive, apologetical and hortatory 
writers in DeBoiv's Review, Gregg, with his slender 
writing, seems to have been alone in the field. 

In the field of transportation there were innu- 
merable essays and reports upon local problems, 
projects and progress in the improvement of transit 
facilities. Among them the treatise of Eobert Mills 
on a project of public works in South Carolina, 1822, 
is notable for its elaboration and pretentiousness 
and for the complete impracticability of his plans. 
Eobert Y. Hayne's essays and reports on the 
Charleston and Cincinnati railroad project, 1837-39, 
were similarly chimerical, as were also some of 
the Alabama writings on plank roads about 1850. 
To offset the recklessness of such writings as 
these, an anonymous writer published a notable se- 
ries of ultra-conservative essays in the Charleston 
Mercury and collected them in a pamphlet, The 
Railroad Mania, By Anti-Deht, Charleston, 1848. In 
the main the Southern essays in the field of trans- 
portation were distinctly sane and well reasoned. 
Some of the official railroad reports are distinctly 
valuable as noting general economic developments 
in their territory year by year. Among such are the 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 179 

reports of the Central of Georgia officers, which 
were collected and reprinted by the company in oc- 
casional volumes. 

The genius of the Southern people ran very 
slightly to commerce, and their literature shows lit- 
tle attention to any but a few of its spectacular 
features. The principal themes attracting the news- 
paper and periodical writers (and there were prac- 
tically no others dealing with commerce) were the 
importance of cotton in the world's commerce, the 
possibility of cornering the cotton supply or other- 
wise manipulating its price in the interest of the 
producers, the project of establishing direct trade 
in steamship lines between Southern ports and 
Europe, and thereby attempting to reduce the 
Northern profits on Southern commerce, and the 
possibility of reopening the African slave trade. 
The cotton trade discussions were most conspicuous 
about 1836 to 1839, the study of foreign commercial 
relations was mainly in the fifties, and the debate 
over the slave trade was waged, between a few advo- 
cates and numerous opponents, between 1855 and 
1861. 

Labor. 

White wage-earning labor was probably not so 
extremely scarce in the ante-bellum South as most 
historians would have us believe, but trades-unions 
were few, and the labor problems apart from ne- 
groes and slavery were not conspicuous enough to 
occasion the writing of many formal essays. Jose])h 
Henry Lumpkin, later chief justice of Georgia, pub- 
lished, in 1852, an essay. The Industrial Regenera- 
tion of the South, which gives his interpretation of 
existing conditions, incidentally, in his somewhat 



180 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

Utopian argument in favor of manufactures. He 
says, in part : 

" It is objected that these inanufacturing"estabUshments will become 
the hotbeds of crime * * * But I am by no means ready to concede 
that our poor, degraded, half-fed, half-clothed and ignorant population, 
without Sabbath schools, or any other kind of instruction, mental or 
moral, or without any just appreciation of character, — ^will be injured 
by giving them employment, which will bring them under the oversight 
of employers who will inspire them with self-respect by taking an inter- 
est in their welfare. ' ' 

The pros and cons of employing free labor for 
plantation work were discussed in newspaper ar- 
ticles, but probably the best journalistic item in this 
connection is that of the traveler-scientist, Charles 
Lyell, written in 1846 and published in his Second 
Visit to the United States (Vol. II., p. 127) : 

"The sugar and cotton crop is easily lost if it is not taken in at once 
when it is ripe * * * Very lately a planter, five miles below New 
Orleans, having resolved to dispense with slave labor, hired one hundred 
Irish and German emigrants at very high wages. In the middle of the 
harvest they all struck for double pay. No others were to be had, and 
it was impossible to purchase slaves in a few days. In that time he lost 
produce to the value of ten thousand dollars." 

, Negroes. 

The Southerners of the plantation districts were 
as familiar with the typical plantation negroes as 
they were with typical cows and horses. Thomas 
Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia (Query 14), 
characterized negroes as improvident, sensuous, in- 
constant, well endowed in memory, poor in reason- 
ing power and dull in imagination. Few, aside from 
Jefferson, thought it necessary to describe the ob- 
vious. In the West Indies, where for many decades 
the volume of slave imports was enormous and 
where the fresh Africans were representative of all 
the diverse tribes from Senegal and Abyssinia to 
Good Hope and Madagascar, the planters were 
prompted to compare the tribal traits and thus to 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 181 

publish discussions of negro characteristics in gen- 
eral. But in the continental South, in the ante- 
bellum period, the tribal stocks, Berber, Coromantee, 
Ebo, Congo, Kaffir, Hottentot, etc., had become 
blended into the relatively constant type of the 
American plantation negro. As a familiar item in 
the white man's environment, the negro was not to 
be described or interpreted, but was rather to be 
accepted and adjusted. Dr. J. C. Nott, of Mobile, at 
the middle of the Nineteenth century, like Mr. F. L. 
Hoffman at the end of it, was led to study and pub- 
lish upon negro traits by reason of his interest in 
life insurance. Dr. S. A. Cartwright, of New Or- 
leans, in the same period as Nott, was led into a 
general study of the negro by his interest in negro 
diseases. Practically all the other writers ap- 
proached the subject of the negro as a corollary to 
the question of the perpetuity of slavery. Dr. J. H. 
Van Evrie, of Washington, later of New York, 
voiced the dominant opinion when he wrote (1853) 
that the ills of the South were mainly attributable 
not to slavery, but to the negro. In 1861 Van Evrie 
further elaborated his unflattering opinion of the 
negro in his book, Negroes and Slavery, which he 
reprinted in 1867 with the title, White Supremacij 
and Negro Subordination. Van Evrie, as usual with 
controversialists, falls into the error of proving too 
much. 

In the case of anti-slavery writers, whether North- 
em or Southern, it required the abolition of slavery 
to reveal the negro as a concrete phenomenon. 
H. R. Helper was the most extreme example of this. 
His Impending Crisis (1857) denounced the mstitu- 
tion of slavery with the greatest vigor as the cause 
of all the Southern ills, but his Nojoque (1867) was 
devoted to a still more absurdly extreme denuncia- 
tion of the negro as a worthless encumbrance and 



182 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

a curse. It is curious that extremely little was pub- 
lished upon the mulatto element, except a few essays 
upon the orthodox but indefensible theme that by 
reason of their shortness of life, their infertility and 
their moral degeneracy, the mixed breed formed a 
negligible though vicious fraction of the population. 

Slavery. 

The economic and social aspects of slavery fur- 
nished a bulk of essays only equalled in the South 
by that upon the political bearings of the same in- 
stitution of domestic servitude. In the colonial 
period the discussion was abundant, sane, and 
matter-of-fact, so far as may be judged from indi- 
rect evidence, but little of it went into print. In the 
period of the Eevolution the discussion was so hys- 
terical in tone that it resulted at the South more in 
reaction than in liberalism. 

The great ante-bellum debate on the subject 
brought forth an extreme variety of essays, both as 
to scope and tone, but the general inclination of the 
writers, with the notable exception of Helper, was to 
confront conditions, not theories. Before 1833 the 
discussion in the South tended to be a humdrum 
rehashing of time-honored views, relieved by an oc- 
casional reflection of the ideas of the European 
economists. James Eaymond wrote an essay on the 
Comparative Cost of Free and Slave Labor in Agri- 
culture in 1827, which was awarded a prize by the 
Frederick County, Maryland, Agricultural Society. 
His argument follows the line of Adam Hodgson's 
reply to J. B. Say's discarded early views: the 
farmer needs an elastic supply of labor, and hireling 
labor is suited for this while slave labor is not; 
slaves are lazy, slipshod, wasteful, as contrasted 
with the carefulness, efficiency and frugality of free- 
men. Eaymond, of course, like the typical abolition- 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 183 

ist, divorced the slavery issue from the negro issue 
by ignoring the question of what would become of 
the great mass of Southern negroes when freed. 
RajTuond also ignored the fact that in the principal 
Southern industries, under the plantation system, 
regularity was more to be desired than elasticity in 
the labor supply, and that slavery secured the de- 
sired constancy in the number of laborers available. 
The publication of Professor Dew's famous essay 
in 1833, prompted by the debate upon projects for 
abolition in the Virginia legislature in 1831-32, 
demonstrated that the slavery question was essen- 
tially a phase of the great negro question. After 
censuring the recklessness of the Virginia debate, 
and showing that slavery had been a highly service- 
able institution in furthering human progress in 
many countries and in many centuries, Dew analyzes 
the American situation and the proposals for its 
betterment. He condemns the several plans, vary- 
ing in detail, for the emancipation and deportation 
of the negroes on the grounds of the excessive cost 
of the process, the threatened paralysis of planta- 
tion industry, and the inability of the negroes to 
maintain their own welfare if deported to Africa. 
He condemns still more strongly all plans for aboli- 
tion which do not include provision for deportation, 
pointing out the social and industrial dangers of 
freeing an irresponsible population, and pointing 
to the record of the Northern free negroes and to 
the chaotic state of affairs in Hayti as warnings. 
After Dew's essay no writer could secure counte- 
nance in the South for any anti-slavery plans unless 
he could show some means of readjusting the negro 
population in a way not endangering the security of 
the whites or threatening the general welfare. 

In close harmony with Dew's argument, essays 
were written in the thirties and forties by Chancel- 



184 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

lor William Harper and Gov. J. H. Hammond, both 
of South Carolina, which were reprinted in 1852 
along with Dew's essay and a slender one by W. G. 
Simms, in a volume entitled the Pro-Slavery Argu- 
ment. Harper, following Dew's theme in general, 
lays main stress upon the civilizing and tranquiliz- 
ing effects of slavery. Hammond's essay, written 
in the form of a reply to Thomas Clarkson's attacks 
upon slavery, is an exceptionally strong apology for 
the institution. He concedes that slave labor is ex- 
pensive, by reason of the slave's first cost and the 
expense of feeding, clothing and sheltering him and 
his family in infancy, sickness and old age, in bad 
seasons as well as good ; and he prophesies that any 
great increase in the density of population will 
cause the abandonment of slavery by making free 
labor available and cheaper. Meanwhile, in view 
of the sparseness of the Southern population and 
the unfitness of the negroes for the stress of com- 
petition, he deprecates any radical readjustments 
and resents extraneous interference. 

Numerous other Southern essayists clamored for 
public attention, of whom only the more significant 
can here be noted. John Fletcher, of Louisiana, in 
1851 issued a bull^ primer to prove the goodness of 
slavery, in easy lessons and with main reference to 
Holy Writ. George S. Sawyer, also of Louisiana, 
gave an elaborate eulogy of slavery upon historical 
and ethical grounds in his Southern Institutes 
(1859). Henry Hughes, in pamphlets of 1858-59, 
tried to bolster up slavery by the euphemistic device 
of changing its name to warranted sm, and thereby 
indicating that its purpose was to maintain industrial 
order rather than to exploit the laboring class; but 
Hughes could not get an audience even in the South 
for his ineffective plea. Daniel Christy, of Cincin- 
nati, entitling his book Cotton is King (1855), mag- 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 185 

nified the economic efficiency and vital importance of 
slavery as a divinely established institution. Though 
Christy may not have been a Southerner, his book 
was adopted by the Southern ultramontanists as 
their own. Professor A. T. Bledsoe, of the Univer- 
sity of Virginia, in his book An Essay on Liberty 
and Slavery (1856), endeavored to refute seventeen 
specific fallacies of the abolitionists, and to \dndi- 
cate slavery and all its works, including the fugitive 
slave law. In 1860 E. N. Elliott, "President 
of Planters' College, Mississippi," bought the au- 
thors' rights to Christy's and Bledsoe's books, se- 
cured new scriptural arguments for slavery from 
Dr. Stringfellow, of Virginia, and Dr. Hoge, of New 
Jersey, and an ethnological essay from Dr. Cart- 
wright, of New Orleans, added to these Hammond's 
and Harper's already standard essays, and the text 
of the Dred-Scott decision by the United States 
Supreme Court, printed the whole in one bulky sub- 
scription volume. Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery 
Arguments (1860), and sold it in great numbers to 
the planters and townsmen on the eve of the war. 
The book, on the whole, compares very unfavorably 
with the more modest but substantial Pro-Slavery 
Argument of 1852. 

More notable as a contribution to thought are the 
two books by George Fitzhugh, of Virginia, with the 
curious titles : Sociology for the South, or the Failure 
of Free Society (1854), and Cannibals All, or Slaves 
Without Masters (1857). Declaring himself an out- 
right socialist, Fitzhugh denounces the whole mod- 
ern system of wage-labor, and contends that labor- 
ers on hire are subject to more severe exploitation 
than laborers in bondage. He advocates benevolent 
despotism on general principles, and particularly 
where applied to a class so little capable of self- 
protection as the negroes in America. He holds up 



186 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

the Southern plantation system for the admiration 
of all socialists, communists, or other paternalists. 
Fitzhugh, however, injures the effect of his books 
by his own loquacity. He adds chapters at random 
championing the South against the North in every 
possible connection, and thereby lets it seem, 
whether justly or not, that he is a socialist only for 
the sake of the argument. 

As an assault upon the general position held by 
the whole group of writers above treated, Hinton R. 
Helper, of North Carolina, issued his startling book. 
The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). He 
points out the relative economic stagnation in the 
South, asserts that slavery is its sole cause, and de- 
nounces the slave-holding class as a cruel and wicked 
oligarchy conspiring for the oppression of the ne- 
groes and non-slave-holding whites alike. Helper 
is a past master in the art of leaping at conclusions 
and concealing the feat by outbursts of perfervid 
rhetoric. Helper was the spokesman of a group of 
radical Southern non-slaveholders, but he secured 
relatively little Southern endorsement on the whole 
because he failed to meet adequately the vital prob- 
lem of what to do with the negro population in the 
event of the abolition of slavery. But the North 
bought fifty thousand copies in three years, and at 
the North, where Helper's Nojoque has always been 
unknown, his Impending Crisis is still considered by 
thousands to be the soundest of interpretations. 

Daniel R. Goodloe, of North Carolina, was a much 
more substantial though less glittering opponent of 
slavery. In his pamphlet of 1846, Inquiry Into the 
Causes Which Have Retarded the Accumulation of 
Wealth and Increase of Population in the Southern 
States, he presented most of the data which Helper 
used ten years later, along with some interpreta- 
tions which were too deep for Helper to grasp. To 



ECOKOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 187 

the time-honored criticism that slavery hampered 
industrial progress by stigmatizing labor, Goodloe 
added a thought which he had worked out that a 
still more important phase of the burdensome char- 
acter of slavery lay in its devoting a huge volume of 
capital to the purchase and control of laborers. He 
showed that by buying laborers instead of hiring 
them the South had long been sinking money and 
depriving itself of resources which might have been 
used to great advantage in the development of large- 
scale manufacturing and commerce. 

The final ante-bellum word upon the burdensome- 
ness of slavery and its actual and prospective deca- 
dence was written by George M. "VVeston, who seems 
to have come from Maine and lived mostly in Wash- 
ington, and at Washington to have gotten into sym- 
pathetic touch with the clearest thinkers on slavery, 
and also to have read well a wide variety of perti- 
nent literature. In his book, llie Progress of 
Slavery in the United States (1857), he shows the 
relatively stagnant condition of the slave-holding 
communities, discussing the reasons therefor, he 
points out the encroaching of the free-labor system 
within the border of the slave-holding section, 
prophesying a still further restriction by economic 
process of the area and importance of slave-holding 
industry, he demonstrates that the then current agi- 
tation for the congressional increase of slave-holding 
territory was purely political in character and of- 
fered no economic advantage to the captains of in- 
dustry in the active plantation districts, and he fore- 
tells that the decadence and disappearance of 
slavery will inure to the benefit instead of the injury 
of the South. To the careful student of Southern 
history it may well appear that Weston's little- 
known book was more representative of the views of 
well-informed and thoughtful Southerners than 



188 HISTORY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

were the manifestoes of the politicians. In those 
years of excited controversy jnst preceding the war, 
public opinion in the South, of course, opposed any 
revision of opinions in the face of the enemy. Pub- 
lic expressions of doubts as to the perfect efficiency 
and goodness of the slavery system were discour- 
aged at the time. But there is little doubt that many 
substantial Southerners held many of the views 
which Hammond, Goodloe and Weston expressed. 
Among the evidences of this may be cited the es- 
says of representative keen Southern students of 
the following generation, who it is most reasonable 
to suppose expressed much of what had existed, even 
though the ideas may have been latent, in the minds 
of thoughtful men in the ante-bellum years. Among 
the essays in point may be mentioned : W. L. Tr en- 
holm. The Southern States, Their Social and In- 
dustrial History, Conditions and Needs, published 
in the Transactions of the American Social Science 
Association for September, 1877, and J. C. Eeed, 
The Old and New South (1876), reprinted in the 
Appendix to the same author's The Brother's War 
(1905). 

Social Surveys. 

As a general treatise upon social types, D. E. 
Hundley's Social Relations in Our Southern States 
(1860) stands alone among the productions of 
Southern writers. Born in the South, the author 
says his education **was chiefly acquired at South- 
ern institutions of learning, in the states of Ala- 
bama, Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia, ' ' and was 
completed by a course in law at Harvard. His col- 
legiate migrations would indicate a waywardness of 
disposition somewhat characteristic of well-to-do 
Southern youth in the period, and his waywardness 
crops out at many places where flippant digressions 
and gibes at the North mar the character of his 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 189 

book. Nevertheless, Hundley was widely traveled, 
closely observant, keen in analysis and facile in 
characterization, and his book is valuable accord- 
ingly. His chapters on the Southern gentleman, 
the Southern middle class, the Southern yeoman, 
the poor-white and the cotton snob, as he calls the 
nouveau riclie of the South, are particularly useful 
contributions. He gives good fragmentary data, 
also, upon student dissipation, upon slave traders 
and upon negro conditions generally, including a 
notice of the social distinctions which prevailed 
among the slaves. 

William Gilmore Simms, in his Southward Ho 
(1854), gives informal sketches of society in Vir- 
ginia and the Carolinas, from the point of view of 
one who was at the same time a middle-class South 
Carolinian and a citizen of the world. Joseph Bald- 
win's Flush Times of Alabama (1853), a semi- 
humorous work, is the chief writing upon society in 
the Southwest. 

Political Essays; Theoretical. 

Southern writings upon the abstract theory of 
government were as scarce as we have seen those to 
have been in theoretical economics. Practically all 
state papers are negligible as essays in political 
theory, including Jefferson's Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and Mason's Virginia Bill of Rights, for 
each of these was merely a brilliantly phrased set 
of ideas borrowed from current European philos- 
ophy, and applied concretely to interpret and justify 
the American problems and policy of the moment. 
The writings of Francis Lieber, notable as they are, 
ought hardly to be claimed as of Southern produc- 
tion, for although Lieber was a professor in South 
Carolina College for many years and wrote all of 
his principal books there, he never ceased to be an 



190 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

alien in the Southern country. With his mind al- 
ways dominated by German idealistic devotion to 
liberty and revolution, he could feel, nothing but 
repugnance at the conditions in the midst of which 
he sojourned and at the philosophy of the people 
who, against his preference, were his neighbors. 
Lieber's books would indicate that he never con- 
fronted any of the distinctive Southern problems of 
concrete racial adjustments. There remain for men- 
tion here only St. George Tucker and John C. Cal- 
houn, each of whom had the United States constitu- 
tion conspicuously in mind when writing upon 
government in general, and each of whom was a full- 
fledged product and a spokesman of the Southern 
community. Tucker's essay, published as an ap- 
pendix to his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries 
(1803), championed the Eighteenth century doc- 
trine of inherent rights and the social compact, and 
applied it elaborately in interpreting the Federal 
system of the United States. By correlating the 
position of the states in the Federal compact with 
the position of individuals in the theoretical social 
compact, he, of course, provided a basis for reason- 
ing out the supremacy of the states and the subordi- 
nate character of the central government. He 
proceeded to state expressly as an inevitable deduc- 
tion from his general scheme of political philosophy, 
that the several states had an indefeasible right of 
seceding from any Federation or Union which they 
had entered or might enter. 

Calhoun organized his formal writing in political 
philosophy into two treatises written shortly before 
his death. Of these, the Disquisition on Govern- 
ment (1851), as Professor W. A. Dunning has well 
said, **is in some respects the most original and 
the most profound political essay in American liter- 
ature. It is by no means a complete philosophy of 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 191 

the state, nor is its relation to the concrete issues 
of the day much disguised ; but it penetrates to the 
very roots of all political and social activity, and 
presents, if it does not satisfactorily solve, the ulti- 
mate intellectual problems in this phase of human 
existence." In bald outline the thread of the essay 
is as follows: Society is necessary to man, and 
government is necessary to society; but govern- 
ments tend to infringe upon the just liberties and 
rights of individuals, and popular governments are 
no less prone toward this oppression than are 
monarchies, for the reason that popular majorities 
are prone to consider their own interests as the only 
ones which the government ought to promote, and 
prone accordingly to ignore and override the in- 
terests and rights of minorities. The suffrage 
franchise alone will not safeguard the individual 
against oppression. Just as governments are in- 
stituted to secure the weak against the strong, con- 
stitutions are established in large part to restrain 
the governments when controlled by strong interests 
from overriding minority rights. To limit the gov- 
ernment properly in this regard without unduly 
weakening it is a most delicate and diflScult problem, 
and one which the framers of the American Federal 
constitution did not fully solve. This is the pro- 
found problem as seen by Calhoun. His prescrip- 
tion of a remedy is less strong than his diagnosis 
of the trouble. He proposes a system of concurrent 
majorities by which each great interest in the coun- 
try should be put into control of one branch of the 
legislative power of the government, and thereby be 
given a veto power upon measures proposed by each 
other great interest. Calhoun's plan is not fully 
adequate for the solution of the problem, but neither 
is any other plan ever yet devised by any philos- 
opher or any nation. 



192 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 
Constitutional Construction. 

Whenever in Federal politics of the ante-bellum 
period a majority in Congress overrode the opposi- 
tion, or was about to override it, upon an important 
issue, it was a fairly constant practice for the 
spokesman of the minority to appeal to the consti- 
tution and declare the programme of the majority 
to be an exercise by the Government of unwar- 
ranted powers. The majority, of course, could often 
ride rough-shod and had little need of resorting to 
pamphlets and treatises to defend its constitutional 
position. Quires were written in championship of 
broad construction, but reams for strict construc- 
tion; and it happened that most of strict construc- 
tion writers were men of the South. Madison's 
articles in the Federalist may be dismissed as being 
devoted to explanation and eulogy rather than to 
the construction of the constitution. Madison soon 
reacted from his nationalistic position and wrote the 
Virginia Eesolutions (1798), which, with Jefferson's 
Kentucky Eesolutions, adopted in minority remon- 
strance against the Alien and Sedition acts of Con- 
gress, served for many years as the official embodi- 
ment of constitutional construction for the state- 
rights school. Shortly afterward, in 1803, John 
Marshall began his series of vigorous nationalistic 
decisions which averaged more than one per year 
for the next thirty years, accompanying the deci- 
sions of his court in most of these cases with ful- 
minations from his own pen to preach the doctrines 
of broad construction. Henry Clay, who, aside from 
Webster, was the principal other spokesman in the 
United States for broad construction, contributed 
no arguments of note upon constitutional topics, but 
confined himself largely to arguments on the 
grounds of expediency, making special use of the 
argumentum ad hominem. The several steps taken 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 193 

by Marshall and Clay gave the chief occasions for 
the publication of strict construction arguments by 
the opposing school. The principal essayists who 
were spurred immediately by Marshall were the 
Virginians, Spencer Eoane and John Taylor, of 
Caroline. Roane, who as chief justice of Virginia 
had the chagrin of seeing some of his own state- 
rights decisions reversed by Marshall's court on 
appeal, resorted to the public press in remonstrance. 
His principal series of articles was printed in the 
Richmond Inquirer in May- August, 1821, and col- 
lected in a pamphlet entitled The Letters of Alger- 
non Sidney. Taylor issued a succession of polemical 
books : Inquiry Into the Principles and Policy of the 
Government of the United States (1813), expressing 
his disrelish of the consolidation tendencies of the 
time; Construction Construed (1820), denouncing 
the McCulloch vs. Maryland decision and asserting 
the sovereignty of the states; Tyranny Uwnasked 
(1822), denying the power of the Federal Supreme 
Court to assign limits to the spheres of state and 
Federal authority, and advocating a state veto for 
emergency use in curbing Federal encroachment, 
and Neiv Views of the Constitution (1823), which 
reiterated his former contention and stressed the 
value of the states as champions of sectional inter- 
ests against injury by hostile congressional ma- 
jorities. 

Clay's campaig-n for his ''American System" 
drew fire mainly from the South Carolinians. In 
1827 Robert J. Turnbull, under the pseudonym of 
Brutus, published a series of thirty-three articles in 
the Charleston Mercury, and promptly issued them 
in a pamphlet entitled The Crisis: Or Essays on 
the Usurpation of the Federal Government, which 
he dedicated *'to the people of the 'Plantation 
States' as a testimony of respect, for their rights 

VoL 7—18. 



194 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

of sovereignty." TurnbuU vehemently urged the 
people of the South to face the facts, to realize that 
the North was beginning to use its control of Con- 
gress for Southern oppression by protective tariffs 
and otherwise; and he proposed as a remedy that 
South Carolina should promptly interpose her own 
sovereignty and safeguard Southern interests by 
vetoing such congressional acts as she should decide 
to be based upon Federal usurpations and intended 
for Northern advantage at the cost of Southern op- 
pression. McDuffie and Hayne promptly assumed 
the leadership of the state-sovereignty-and-South- 
ern-rights cause in Congress and many other promi- 
nent South Carolinians fell in line, including the 
editors E. B. Rhett and J. H. Hammond, and in- 
cluding most conspicuously John C. Calhoun, who 
drafted nearly all the state papers of South Caro- 
lina during the nullification episode, and who, in 
addition, issued powerful memorials upon the issues 
of the day over his own signature. These writings 
are too prominently a part of American history to 
require any detailed discussion here. 

The final issue prompting state sovereignty ex- 
pressions was that of negro slavery. The principal 
work in this group was Calhoun's Discourse on the 
Constitution and Government of the United States 
(1851), which supplements his Disquisition on Gov- 
ernment, already outlined. This Discourse follows 
the theme of his more general Disquisition, applying 
its contentions more specifically to the American 
Federal problem; it champions concurrent major- 
ities again, champions the historical doctrine of 
state sovereignty and defends, in somewhat subdued 
phrase, his former pet plan of nullification. The 
Discourse and the Disquisition were Calhoun's po- 
litical testament; the great obituary of the state 
sovereignty and secession movement was Alexander 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 195 

H. Stephens' Constitutional View of the War be- 
tween the States, which, as a post-bellum work, falls 
beyond our present scope. 

Party Politics. 

It was the custom of but a few leaders to address 
their constituents for party purposes through es- 
says instead of from the hustings. One of these was 
Robert Goodloe Harper, who, upon his retirement 
from Congress in 1801, addressed to his South Caro- 
lina constituents a eulogistic but sane and vigorous 
memoir upon the constructive work of his party: 
A Letter Containing a Short View of the Political 
Principles of the Federalists, and of the Situation 
in Whicli They Found and Left the Government. 
Another was Edward Livingston, who, when asking 
for reelection to Congress in 1825, issued an Address 
to the Electors of the Second District of Louisiana, 
which is notable for his attempt to reconcile the 
desire of the sugar planters for protection to their 
own industry with the disrelish of the cotton plant- 
ers for the policy of protection in general, by the de- 
vice of calling the duty on sugar a revenue item and 
not a protective item in the tariff schedules. Various 
other candidates, of course, issued electioneering 
pamphlets, practically all of which are negligible as 
essays. On a plan combining an historical sketch 
with political propaganda were several writings 
such as Thomas Cooper's Consolidation: An Ac- 
count of Parties in the United States, from the Con- 
vention of 1787 to the Present Period (1824), writ- 
ten, of course, with a state-rights purpose; Henry 
A. Wise's Seven Decades of the Union, eulogizing 
John Tyler and the policy of the state-rights AMngs, 
and such biographies as J. F. H. Claiborne's Life 
and Correspondence of John A. Quitman (1860), 
which contains secession propaganda on the au- 



196 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

thor's own account along with the biography of 
Quitman. 

Sectionalism. 

Instead of making a catalogue of the many essays 
which deal with petty sectionalism within the sev- 
eral states and with grand sectionalism between the 
North and the South, we will conclude our view of 
economic and political writings by presenting the 
theme of William H. Trescott's The Position and 
Course of the South (1860), as an embodiment of 
the soundest realization of the sectional conditions 
and prospects of the Southern section in the closing 
decade of the ante-bellum period. The author, a 
leading, experienced, conservative citizen of South 
Carolina, states in his preface, dated Oct. 12, 1850, 
that his purpose is to unify the widely separated 
parts of the South. He says his views are not new, 
but they are characteristically Southern: **We are 
beginning to think for ourselves, the first step to- 
ward acting for ourselves." The essay begins with 
an analysis of industrial contrasts. He says that 
in the slavery system the relation of capital and 
labor is moral — labor is a duty, in the wage-earning 
system the relation is legal — the execution of con- 
tract. The contract system, he says, promotes con- 
stant jealousy and friction between capital and 
labor, while the slavery system secures peace by 
subordinating labor to capital. The political ma- 
jority of the North represents labor; that of the 
South, capital; the contrast is violent. Free labor 
hates slave labor, and will overturn the system if it 
can. The two sections with many contrasting and 
conflicting characteristics are combined under the 
United States constitution, but they are essentially 
irreconcilable. Even in foreign relations the North 
is jealous of foreign powers for commercial and 
industrial reasons, while Southern industry is not 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 197 

competitive with, but complementary to European 
industry and commerce, and the South, if a nation 
by itself, would be upon most cordial terms with 
foreign powers. ''The United States government 
under the control of Northern majorities must re- 
flect Northern sentiment, sustain Northern interests, 
impersonate Northern power. Even if it be con- 
ceded that the South has no present grievance to 
complain of, it is the part of wisdom to consider the 
strength and relations of the sections, and face the 
question, what is the position of the South? In case 
our rights should be attacked, where is our constitu- 
tional protection? The answer is obvious. If the 
expression of outraged feeling throughout our 
Southern land be anything but the wild ravings of 
wicked faction, it is time for the South to act firmly, 
promptly and forever. But one course is open to 
her honor, and that is secession and the formation 
of an independent confederacy. There are many 
men grown old in the Union who would feel an hon- 
est and pardonable regret at the thought of its 
dissolution. They have prided themselves on the 
success of the great American experiment of polit- 
ical self-government, and feel that the dissolution 
of the Union would proclaim a mortifying failure. 
Not so. The vital principle of political liberty is 
representative government, and when Federal ar- 
rangements are discarded, that lives in original 
vigor. ^Tio does not consider the greatest triumph 
of the British constitution the facility and vigor 
with which, under slight modifications, it developed 
into the great republican government under which 
we have accomplished our national progress. And 
so it will be with the United States constitution. 
The experiment of our fathers will receive its high- 
est illustration, and a continent of great republics, 
equal, independent and allied, will demonstrate to 



198 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 

the world the capabilities of republican constitu- 
tional government. We believe that Southern in- 
terests demand an independent government. We 
believe that the time has now come when this can 
be established temperately, wisely, strongly. But 
in effecting this separation we would not disown our 
indebtedness, our gratitude to the past. The Union 
has spread Christianity, fertilized a wilderness, en- 
riched the world's commerce wonderfully, spread 
Anglo-Saxon civilization. ''It has given to the 
world sublime names, which the world will not wil- 
lingly let die — heroic actions which will light the 
eyes of a far-coming enthusiasm. It has achieved 
its destiny. Let us achieve ours." 

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mond, 1833); Helper, H, R.: The Impending Crisis of the South: How to 



ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ESSAYS. 199 

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Ulrich B. Phillips, 
Professor of History, Tvlane University, 



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